Muramasa: Rebirth Is Vanilla Ware

Do you like games that are hollowed out lies and which serve seemingly little purpose but to remind you that your finite life is often wasted on outwardly interesting games? Then perhaps Muramasa: Rebirth is a game I can wholeheartedly recommend to you. Not that the game is bad, necessarily. It’s just such an obviously shallow experience that I find its few achievements to be frustrating reminders of what the game could be. Indeed, Brandon’s piece a few weeks back discussing Dragon’s Crown's many successful qualities only serve to remind me how successful developer Vanillaware can be if they manage to move beyond their insane obsession with graphics.

Muramasa Rebirth is a Vita port of a near-identical Wii version called Muramasa: The Demon Blade. Both versions of this game are an artistic success in every sense of the word. An obscene amount of focus from Vanillaware obviously went into the painstaking detail and beauty found in this game’s character models and environments. But that’s about all this game has in terms of merit, and I find myself at times bored by how lackluster and repetitive the overall package comes across.

At its core, Muramasa is a simple MetroidVania-style action game. The maps the player visits throughout his/her quest are broken up into nearly identical backgrounds where enemies are encountered occasionally, popping into the screen much like random encounters in JRPGs. You fight bosses and forge new swords, which are either heavy or light in nature, and which usually have unique properties. It’s a formula I’ve simply seen too many times to become enthusiastic about. And the problem is that nothing is done terribly well.

Prior to starting Muramasa, I had just come out of a 40-hour commitment with Front Mission 5, which felt like one of those long marriages when you spend your quiet life together quilting shirts and then wearing said shirts while you console one another about the inevitability of death. It was at times warm and gentle, but also harsh and draining. Muramasa was meant to ail this melancholy emptiness I felt once I finished with Front Mission 5.

I think the problem is that Front Mission 5 had too much heart: It was clearly a game developed by a studio whose intention was to create a magnum opus for their fans, many of whom have come to expect a challenging story framed by smart, tactical combat. In contrast, Muramasa feels sort of like a cluster of gameplay ideas from previous Vanillaware games held together feebly by an impenetrably wordy story.

Previous Vanillaware games, such as Odin Sphere and GrimGrimoire, managed to convey real heart in spite of their numerous flaws. For instance, Odin Sphere felt grandiose, with characters playing differently, and a world which felt expansive thanks to a largely coherent story. Muramasa feels tired in comparison: the player is given the choice between two functionally identical characters and are expected to mindlessly engage with a limited grouping of enemy types repeatedly until, thankfully, a boss comes along to wash away much of the monotony which smothers you for the hour or so leading up to it.

The issue with assuming that this is a viable game design is that too much of Muramasa’s core gameplay is flawed. For one, the controls are disgustingly shoddy. Both blocking and attacking are assigned to the same button, which makes last-minute cancels from an attack into a block next to impossible. Dodging is also overly cumbersome, requiring the player to move the control nub down/right or down/left, which I feel is far too impractical during combat.

Combat is also too hectic. I imagine my Vita crying before each random encounter, because of how many objects it needs to render during fights. Between the six ninjas lunging around the screen, the three shrunken they are each throwing at me, along with my HUD and my own character reacting to enemy threats, there is very little on the screen in a given moment that is static. Thankfully, the framerate is smooth and consistent throughout this experience. But it just feels like there is too much happening on screen at once, which makes for an often distracting play-session.

Sadly, Muramasa: Rebirth is an utterly average action experience. Its weak body has been delicately placed into a graphical shell whose outward appearance is so radiant that I was foolishly consumed into purchasing it. Now that it and I have shared time together, I feel cheated.  

Oddly, once the anger washes away and time has its way with my memories, I feel that I am most likely to remember perhaps the most incidental detail in Muramasa: that the intricate detailing of food in this game is stupefying. I find myself constantly hungry; constantly wanting more of the game that offers me such a painstaking rendition of maki and yet offers so little in terms of gameplay diversity. I guess I really want more sweater-quilting memories with my games than I think I do.